Three words into each refrain of “lie in the grass,” Gillian Rae Perry stops: “I am still.” For a moment the line describes the body the title asks for, at rest on the ground. Then she restarts the phrase and the word turns to its other meaning, the one about continuing. Perry wrote the song a few months after her father died, when relief came mostly in physical moments like lying in the grass or floating in the ocean. Her refrain fits both senses of the word into one breath, and the song argues that the first produces the second: you lie still so you can keep going.
Perry composes for opera houses and orchestras, including the Chicago Philharmonic and Chicago Opera Theater, and on this small acoustic song she treats the halted phrase like a notated rest, a measured silence the listener has to wait through. Each verse pins the continuing sense to something new. The breeze becomes the planet exhaling, proof that she is breathing too; the trees turn color, so her own mistakes and changes can be ordinary. The heaviest refrain arrives after she floats and lets go of what she has been carrying. She thinks of her father, holds on to the best parts of him, and insists she remains his child, a present-tense claim on a bond that outlives him.
The final verse drops the pattern. Perry goes looking for moonlight and pictures a song for her friends, and the stutter that belonged to one word moves to love as she tells everyone how much she loves them. She has said she wants the track to feel like a hug to anyone in acute pain, and the ending delivers it: the body in the grass gets up, and the first thing it does is sing to other people.
Leave a Reply